“They will keep a very, very strong focus on the street,” she says.
But with the hijab no longer enforced outside state institutions, even before the war, and alcohol quietly available in Tehran restaurants, there are also signs that the regime may gradually be casting aside some of the old taboos.
Vali Nasr says it’s all driven by necessity: the need to restore faith in the state.
“They made a pragmatic decision that their raison d’état [literally “reason of state”] requires them to relax these things,” he says.
After the shock generated by its mass bloodletting in January, the regime has shown that it can at least protect the country’s sovereignty.
For Iranians, the war has been profoundly confusing. Horror at the regime’s brutality gradually gave way to a different kind of horror, as American and Israeli bombs rained down on their country, killing civilians and damaging vital infrastructure.
The deaths of scores of children at an elementary school in Minab, on the first day of the war, caused some to wonder who the real enemy was. After promising to liberate them, Israel and the US seemed intent on destroying the country.
But having stood up to the combined might of the US and Israel, can Iran’s new leadership capitalise on this potentially fleeting opportunity to rebuild the regime’s shattered legitimacy?
“This is a sort of China-after-Mao moment,” Vaez says, “in the sense that the system as a whole recognises that something’s got to give. This new leadership understands that it needs a new social contract.”
Whether they can deliver it is an open question. More than ever, Iran is now run by the IRGC elite, while huge numbers of well-educated young people, still grieving over the loss of thousands of their friends in January’s bloody crackdown, feel they have no real say in determining the country’s future.
This is an inflection point, with Iran poised precariously between old certainties and future possibilities, both at home and abroad.
Despite a series of recent flare-ups in the Gulf, Tehran has embarked on a diplomatic process with the US which could result in what US Vice President JD Vance has already called “a fundamentally transformed relationship.”